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Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Seasickness At The Star Gate

Sometimes it seems like federal politicians, once elected, enter into a device not unlike the Star Gate ("an ancient ring-shaped device that creates a wormhole enabling travel to a similar device a galaxy away"), then off to the Washington, D.C. galaxy they go.

These politicians, once they have made the trip to D.C., often no longer talk nor act like the person campaigning for office who we voted for.

The internal direction finder for that special type of spin device goes only in The W Direction.

That space ship spin makes them toxin rich it would seem, because after the ride "the American people" is a saying that does not apply to that verbal homogeneous myth they create, use, and repeat often to bolster their rejection of "campaign speech reality", which they then progressively replace with "campaign contribution reality".

Of course that presidentially applies to Barak Obama, but this post is mostly focused on his own Brownie, like the Brownie of Bush II before him, instead of the Mr. President himself.

We know that at the behest of his advisor Browner, he took his children swimming into the waters of Oilah Akbar in order to show how safe the Gulf of Mexico waters were.

But also less known is that he did it to show how good the animals taste after they have been baptized into the Oilah Akbar religion (the religion of addiction, the religion of the worship the the Dark Liquid Lord) whom the poets call Johnny:

Johnny’s in the basementMixing up the medicineI’m on the pavementThinking about the governmentThe man in the trench coatBadge out, laid offSays he’s got a bad coughWants to get it paid offLook out kidIt’s somethin’ you didGod knows whenBut you’re doin’ it againYou better duck down the alley wayLookin’ for a new friendThe man in the coon-skin capBy the big penWants eleven dollar billsYou only got ten

The deep-sea hydrocarbon discharge resulting from the BP oil well blowout in the northern Gulf of Mexico released large quantities of oil and gaseous hydrocarbons such as methane into the deep ocean. So far, estimates of hydrocarbon discharge have focused on the oil released, and have overlooked the quantity, fate and environmental impact of the gas. Gaseous hydrocarbons turn over slowly in the deep ocean, and microbial consumption of these gases could have a long-lasting impact on oceanic oxygen levels. Here, we combine published estimates of the volume of oil released, together with provisional estimates of the oil to gas ratio of the discharged fluid, to determine the volume of gaseous hydrocarbons discharged during the spill. We estimate that the spill injected up to 500,000 t of gaseous hydrocarbons into the deep ocean and that these gaseous emissions comprised 40% of the total hydrocarbon discharge. Analysis of water around the wellhead revealed discrete layers of dissolved hydrocarbon gases between 1,000 and 1,300 m depth; concentrations exceeded background levels by up to 75,000 times. We suggest that microbial consumption of these gases could lead to the extensive and persistent depletion of oxygen in hydrocarbon-enriched waters.

The BP Blowout was not an oil spill, it was a hydrocarbon discharge. The discharge contained 40% gaseous hydrocarbons like methane. We converted this gaseous discharge to "barrel of oil equivalent" units and found that the gas component accounted for an additional 1.5 to 3 million barrel of oil equivalents discharged. This increases the size of the discharge by a significant margin, by 30 to 50%. ...

Looking out the window of ALVIN, at first, it did not seem to be so bad but as we got nearer to the bottom, I realized there were no infauna (worms and such) poking their heads out to greet us. Usually, there is a tremendous diversity of infaunal organisms on the bottom. Then, we began to see dead organisms like brittle stars. I noticed there were no holothurians (sea cucumbers) and these organisms are tremendously abundant at seeps. So, it was a grim view. We saw a few crabs but they did not look healthy and we saw oiled and dead corals. Overall, a very depressing sight but one that made me realize that we have to do a lot more mapping and visit the seafloor around the wellhead with submersibles and ROVs to truly understand which species have been impacts and to determine the area impact.

Joye’s report comes as a bit of a surprise (even to Joye); previous studies commissioned by Kenneth Feinberg, the government’s oil compensation fund czar, were optimistic that the Gulf would “almost fully recover by 2012.”

(Matternet). Ok, so now let's focus on the area nearer to the surface, where more of the "food stuffs" come from.For several months now, that zone has been a source of contaminated food according to tests by different investigators.

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